Everybody's Talking About Like.com
There's a ton of buzz around a new visual comparison shopping engine that launched today called Like.com. Formally it was Riya.com and uses the technology behind Riya.com to power it's engine. They even have a blog link which I hope will have much more to come, after today's initial post.
At first I had a little trouble getting Like.com to work, it kept loading up a blank page in both IE and FireFox. After writing this post for a bit and collecting all the other reviews, I went back and tried to see if it would load up and it did. Wow, what a great idea, and what a nice shopping environment. Beyond the hype of "what a celebrity" wears (I specifically chose the shoes Tom Cruise wears, since I obviously don't wear men's shoes, to avoid being jaded), this is really a great engine.
First of, it's appeal to me is "clean". I find most comparison shopping engines to be cluttered and junky (Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, Nextag all make me shudder), but this was really nice. It felt very pleasing and comfortable. Although I was first startled by the mouse overs (see image below), I grew to like them, as well as the slide bars that let me guage what matters most to me. They also have a color picker, much along the lines of Become.com's newly launched color search system.
This is definitely worth the time to take a look at if you are retailer. I'd even encourage you to get at least some of your products in there, however, right now it does seem to be limited to jewelry, handbags, shoes & watches.
If you are interested, I've assembled a "link roundup" on Like.com:
- Search Engine Journal - Like.com : Celebrity Look a Like Search and Commerce
- Search Engine Watch - Like.com Offers Visual Fashion Search
- John Battelle's Searchblog - Like.com Unveils a Visual Search Engine
- ComparisonEngines - Like.com (formerly Riya) Launches
- Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim - You Might Like.com this New Shopping Search Engine
- Tech Crunch - Riya’s Like.com Is First True Visual Image Search (Arrington's got some great screen caps in his review)
- BusinessWeek - Like.com: Visual Shopping Search
- Scobelizer - So, how good is Like.com?
- VentureBeat - Like’s visual search very good for shopping
After reading through a lot of these reviews and comments on the reviews, a reoccurring site kept popping up - Chez Imelda out of the UK. ChezImelda.com is a shoe shopping site using technologies made by PIXSTA. I could get to that site and what I saw there is pretty neat, especially if you are a shoe fiend like I am.
Finally, if you feel a bit confused at first in the Like.com engine, take the tour to understand how to utilize it to its full potential.
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